Is My Child Next? A Question No Parent Should Have to Wonder

Prayers are good. But prayer without action is hypocrisy.

I sit in tears writing this. It isn’t the first time this week I have wept as I’ve read and watched the events unfold and the unfathomable aftermath. Like my friend, Kaylee Morgan, who wrote on the Buffalo Massacre just last week, I can too easily put myself in the shoes of the parents who lost their children. It is gut-wrenching to think about.

Many of these parents had been at the school earlier that morning, celebrating their child’s achievements in an award ceremony as the school year came to an end. As they said goodbye, with promises of ice cream after school, they never could have anticipated this would be the last time they would see each other.

But this has become an all too frequent reality. ‘School shooting’ has become a familiar headline. And it’s not just the mass shootings that are killing children. This year alone has seen 27 school shootings that have involved injury or death. Mass shootings in the U.S. have already surpassed 200 this year.

Active shooter incidents, as they are called by the FBI, have resulted in more than 1,024 deaths and 1,828 injuries between 2000-2020. There were 345 such incidents during this time. FBI data has also found that the rate of these incidents is going up. In fact, last year the number of active shooter incidents increased by 50%.

This particular incident happened because an 18-year-old had full legal access to purchase two AR-15s. This style of weapon is commonly used in mass shootings. The Buffalo shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Las Vegas, Pulse nightclub, and Parkland to name a few. These rifles, like their military counterparts, are designed to kill multiple people and quickly. While the semi-automatic status means the shooter has to pull the trigger for each shot, the gun is designed to load and shoot the 30 rounds it holds quickly and with ease.

To put the damage that these guns do into perspective, DNA samples had to be provided to identify the children killed, simply because these guns are designed to destroy.

Many politicians have used this latest shooting to tout the need for solutions such as teachers being armed or for exits to be reduced in schools and to only have one point of entry that can be monitored. Many politicians avoiding the conversation of gun reform are heavily funded by the NRA thus creating a conflict of interest when pressed to reform gun-ownership laws.

Gun reform has been proven to work in many countries and even in America’s history when the Clinton administration issued a ban on assault-style weapons effectively reducing mass shootings when compared to the data from the decade before and after the ban was in place.

Prayers are good. But prayer without action is hypocrisy. Prayer from people who have the power to change the situation is beyond reasonable rationale. We need substantial change and reform. The deaths of these children and the trauma of those left behind in these mass shooting events are preventable.

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